About the Russian Language Learning on the Web project
The 'Ruslang' project is a joint venture of the University
of Sussex and the London School of
Economics & Political Science. The website is co-hosted at Sussex
and LSE.
Note: This page deals predominantly with the development of the website. If you are looking for advice on using the website or dealing with technical problems, please see the help pages or the troubleshooting pages respectively.
About the Programme
- an author page with biographical details and links
- a text with hypertext links to vocabulary and grammar points
- a historical background page, with external links
- a critical essay on the text
- a series of exercises which use vocabulary and grammar points specific to each text
- a grammar reference page
- a translation option with three choices, all English, parallel texts, and parallel texts in separate frames
- an audio option where students can listen to the text read in Russian
- a video option with basic and advanced level dialogues about the author, with transcripts
With the exception of the Gogol criticism, the background essays were especially written for the Project by staff at LSE and Sussex, and the translations are our own and deliberately Nabokovian - sacrificing English style for the sake of clearly rendering the Russian original.
One of the primary aims of our programme is to make language teaching more responsive to the needs of the recipients. Exercises in this programme are designed with attention to the specific educational context and are derived from real problems experienced by the students - as a result they are more motivating. To maximise their relevance the following factors, along with motivation, were taken into account: students' learning styles; learning strategies; previous learning experience and course level.
The layout of the exercises is simple and easy to use; it does not require explicit instruction, which will save a lot of precious time during the tutor-led sessions and encourage students to use the programme individually. On the one hand, the ready-made exercises gain in practical convenience and remain valuable as an independent supplementary activity, and, on the other hand, they could be adapted and made relevant to a specific teaching context: they may be tailored in such a way that one can use them for students of different proficiency and ability levels and for different types of sessions - in or outside class. In class, the use of various strategies may be supported by teacher prompts (e.g. specially designed work-sheets, cue cards and charts). Using this programme for self-study, students can work at their own pace and complete the tasks in their own time. Positive motivation obtained through maximum relevance to other courses, stimulating layout and no sense of failure will ensure consolidation of the prior knowledge and facilitate learning of new concepts and phrases.
There are four groups of interactive exercises accompanying the literary text of each author, offered as two separate options: the EXERCISES option includes grammar, reading comprehension and vocabulary exercises, and the VIDEO option provides authentic material for listening comprehension. Grammar exercises are designed to assist students in tackling the most difficult grammar topics; they are suitable for intermediate and advanced students. Reading comprehension, listening and vocabulary exercises can be used by students of all levels with either little or no teacher involvement for intermediate and advanced students, and with more prompting for less experienced students. All exercises under the EXERCISE option are supplied with feedback given in a separate frame at the bottom of the exercise page and provide the score reflecting students' progress in a specific activity. Grammar mistakes are analysed and presented in the form of comments on each particular example. Students may also look for grammar explanations relevant to the chosen exercise by clicking the GRAMMAR button, if necessary. Reading comprehension exercises include explanatory comments in case of a wrong answer. Several attempts to fill the gap with the missing word are allowed in the vocabulary exercises; however, the number of attempts will be taken into account for scoring. Listening exercises based on video recordings of contextually relevant interviews and dialogues can, if required, be accompanied with the scripts.
The short-term goals of every lesson involving the use of these exercises are the elaboration of students' reading, writing, listening and speaking skills. The long-term goal is the development of independent techniques in processing literary texts and conversational patterns. We hope that our programme will teach students to adapt their use of strategies to the demands of the text and situation and to mix their strategic actions with associations to prior knowledge in ways that would permit fulfilment of their purpose.
Audio and video, predictably, caused the most headaches. The quality of the original digital video clips degraded significantly when processed for the web as QuickTime files, so that the poor sound quality of the student dialogue and the bad lighting in the clip of the little girl make them difficult to use. The processing and embedding were fairly straightforward, using Adobe Premiere.
The audio page was more difficult. We experimented with WAV files, using JavaScript in an attempt to provide a variety of control options for the students, but finally opted for the more straightforward option of embedded RealAudio controls next to each paragraph. We also decided against using WAV files due to their size and therefore download time; although the primary audience is on the local network, the quality of RealAudio files is adequate for students and they begin playing faster - students do not have to wait for the files to fully download before they can hear them.
Note: This page deals predominantly with the development of the website. If you are looking for advice on using the website or dealing with technical problems, please see the help pages or the troubleshooting pages respectively.
"The history/background is informative and interesting...it is very good that it is possible to link to a variety of different sources...a little more information about Pushkin himself would be interesting on the Pushkin page".
"The way the translation is set out is useful as you can see both the languages at once. The exercises work well although they do seem quite difficult for first years".
Generally the students responded with enthusiasm, and found the package easy to follow and use. However, the length of the texts used caused several students difficulty, finding it uncomfortable to read from the screen. We responded by choosing a poem for the fourth author, to reduce the volume of material to read, and a Gogol short story that could be tackled in two sections.
About Us
Stella Rock
Stella Rock (MA, DPhil, University of Sussex) is senior research fellow, Keston Center for Religion, Politics & Society, Baylor University (Texas). She is a historian of Russian Orthodoxy, with particular interest in popular or lived religion and the relationship between religious and national identity. She maintains a research interest in the relationship between religion, prejudice and conflict. Stella is the author of Popular Religion in Russia: 'Double-belief' and the Making of an Academic Myth (Routledge, 2007) as well as many articles and book chapters.
Olga Soboleva
Dr Olga Soboleva teaches undergraduate courses in Literature and Society at LSE and is currently the Russian Language co-ordinator. Her research interests include Comparative Literature with particular reference to Russian and French Symbolism; early twentieth century Russian literature and art; Anglo-Soviet comparative studies in the Cold War period, and post-totalitarian culture. Recent publications: The Silver Mask: Harlequinade in the Symbolist Poetry of Blok and Belyi (Peter Lang Publishers, June 2008); articles on Chekhov. Dostoevsky and modern remakes of Turgenev; recently organised exhibitions: GB Shaw in Russia, and Censorship in Literature and Drama.
Natalia Tronenko
Natalia taught Linguistics, and Russian Language at the
University of Sussex. She has a PhD in Philology from the University
of Kiev and a DPhil in Linguistics from Oxford University.
Her main research interests are Slavic morphosyntax, metaphor, idioms
and bilingualism. Natalia also ran the Slavic Folk Dance Society at Sussex
for several years, and is co-founder of the Russian Society
at Sussex. She has published a number of articles on linguistics
and the Russian Language.
Russell Watson
Technical wizard and a former student of the School of European Studies at Sussex, Russell contributed to the design and creation of websites for several schools at Sussex University, as well as working on the Ruslang project. His particular forté is structuring websites, programming SHTML, Javascript, style-sheets and integration of relational databases.
Other Contributors
